When I read that Jimmy Carter’s advances towards Hezbollah were rebuffed, I couldn’t help thinking of the Todal. The what?
A lock of the guard’s hair turned white and his teeth began to chatter. “The Todal looks like a blob of glub,” he said. “It makes a sound like rabbits screaming, and smells of old, unopened rooms. It’s waiting for the Duke to fail in some endeavor.It’s an agent of the devil, sent to punish evil-doers for having done less evil than they should.”
Apparently, Jimmy just didn’t measure up.
And while ex-President Jimmy didn’t do evil as much as enable evil, his record as an enabler is actually quite impressive.
One of the worst of his clients has been Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Messrs. Carter and Young would only countenance a settlement in which Mr. Mugabe, a Marxist who had repeatedly made clear his intention to turn Zimbabwe into a one-party state, played a leading role. Mr. Young, displaying the willful naivet� that came to characterize Mr. Carter’s mindset, told the London Times that Mr. Mugabe was a “very gentle man” whom he “can’t imagine � ever pulling the trigger on a gun to kill anyone.”
Mr. Mugabe already had pulled the trigger on many innocent people, though. And not long after taking power in 1980, he killed about 25,000 people belonging to a minority tribe, the Ndebele. In spite of this, in 1989, Mr. Carter launched his “Project Africa” in Zimbabwe, a program aimed at helping African countries maintain food sustainability.
Mugabe’s latest accomplishment to make the news is a cholera outbreak.
“No matter how much medicine they bring, they are not going to contain this cholera, because they are treating the symptoms rather than the disease,” says Tongesai, a well-educated man in his mid-30s whose younger brother was admitted earlier in the day. “The cholera is coming from the water, which is contaminated. It is not the boreholes that are bringing in the contaminated water, but the water from the city. That water is now getting to the people without being treated, and that is how people get cholera. It is tantamount to drinking raw sewage.” And this is why Mugabe’s government bears ultimate responsibility for the suffering of its people.
Regardless of his record of supporting all manners of tyrants, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the ex-President yesterday in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Remarkably there’s nothing in Carter’s op-ed about Zimbabwe. Of course, sharp guy that he is, Carter recognizes the central problem of America’s image regarding human rights:
Throughout the Middle East, there is hope that the United States will move more aggressively and persistently to help orchestrate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the prism through which the region measures the U.S. commitment to human rights.
So if the United States pressures Israel to cede more land to create a state that denies its people freedom of the press, and due process and incites against Israel America’s human rights image will improve.
I can’t complain too much about the Washington Post’s decision to give Jimmy op-ed space, after all he isn’t the head of a terrorist organization. Still maybe it would have been better to have him right about something he knows, like building homes for the poor instead of something he’s been so miserable at promoting.
I would point out that Carter isn’t the only one with a blindness about human rights, especially in the Middle East. Yet his hypocrisy of claiming to champion them while giving support to the worst abusers of human rights is especially extreme.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Carter was bought and paid for when BCCI bailed out his failing peanut farm and his pal Bert Lance’s bank back when Carter was governor. Carter has received lots of oily money since leaving office. He should go back to carpentry.